East Asia

“This searching system is released for using the original catalogue attached (including titles, author and additional bibliographical information) and the digitized images of Daiber collection at the same time. The corresponding images are linked from the bibliographical information written in the catalogue.

This collection is the corpus of manuscripts mainly focused on Arabic, collected by Dr. Hans Daiber, a professor of Islamic studies in Germany, over many years. Institute of Oriental Culture, University of Tokyo purchased the collection, its first part in 1986-1987 and its second part in 1994.”

"Database of Nusantara Islam Manuscripts is a database that provides various informations related to Nusantara Islam manuscripts. The database covers a wide range of Nusantara Islam manuscripts-based research—using philological approach or other approaches; conducting by foreign scholars or native scholars. As the center of Nusantara Islam manuscripts, the database not only records the title, author, copyist, language, and literacy texts, but also provides a number of manuscript collections and catalogues including lists, and various publications relating to manuscript which is used as the primary resource of research. In addition, the database provides authors and copyists’ biographical information and their activities. Therefore, Database of Nusantara Islam Manuscripts, as the center of information and research on manuscript that can be accessed online, is very important for the manuscripts-based researches and other researches. Thus, through the information contained in the database of Nusantara Islam manuscript, various topics of research can be developed further, while the potential for duplication and plagiarism cases in the study of manuscipt can also be avoided."

“.MyManuskrip or Digital Library of Malay Manuscript enables repositories within Malaysia and those outside to participate in building and offering manuscript content as well as outputs of manuscript research such as articles, reports, theses and links to relevant sites. As such, repositories, cultural and national heritage centers, manuscript libraries and museums are invited to share and provide access to their manuscript contents and expert knowledge concerning Malay scriptorium. We now have 4 collections and more than 179 titles of manuscripts in our archive.”

Middle East

“The Uzbek/Naqshabandi Zawiya is one of the many Sufi Courts in the Old City of Jerusalem which prospered during the Mamluk and later the Ottoman eras. The Naqshabandi Court was mentioned in many sources which documented earlier times of Jerusalem and was known as Uzbek Zawiya after the name Sheikh Hassan Ben Mohammad Al Uzbeki. It was also known as Bukhari Zawiya after the Bukhari family who still live in this court....The first catalogue of Uzbek manuscripts collection was published in 2003 and contains 177 manuscripts including 167 single manuscripts and 10 Majamee’ (clusters). The largest manuscript in the collection is in the size of 22.5/32.5 cm and the smallest is in the size of 10/15.5 cm.”

West Africa

"The West African Arabic Manuscript Database currently includes descriptive records of 20,000 Arabic manuscripts from West Africa. The database and search interface are bilingual. Comments, queries, and expressions of interest in adding data sets to this one are encouraged: please contact Prof. Charles Stewart."

“The Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University houses an important collection of Arabic script materials from West Africa. It contains over 5,000 items collected from Africa and donated to the library by several Northwestern professors. Original, hand-written manuscripts make up more than 60 percent of the content, which also includes ‘market’ editions (photocopies of handwritten works that are often sold in African marketplaces), printed editions, and photocopies. Most are in Arabic, though some are in ajami—African languages such as Hausa, Fulfulde, and Wolof written in the Arabic script.

The collection unites an impressive concentration of works by West African authors, mainly from the 19th and 20th centuries, making it a unique and valuable resource for scholars interested in the production of Islamic knowledge in West Africa (for more information on this tradition, see “Historical Context”). It is especially strong in works from northern Nigeria (Kano in particular) but also includes items from Ghana, Senegal, and Mali. The works cover a wide range of subjects, including poetry, Arabic grammar, history, theology, Sufism, law, astronomy, and numerology. Highlights include the collection’s rich body of work on the Tijâniyya Sufi order, fine examples of Hausa poetry, and writings on medicine and healing.

"The digital collection of Old Kanembu manuscripts provides an online access to one of the earliest written sub-Saharan languages in manuscript form. Old Kanembu written in Arabic script was a language of Qur’anic interpretation in the ancient Borno Sultanate. It has survived in marginal and interlinear annotations in the early Qur’an manuscripts dating from the 17th to 19th centuries and in various other religious texts dating from the 19th century to 1980’s.

The Old Kanembu corpus originates from Qur’anic manuscripts photographed by David Bivar in 1950s and donated to the SOAS Library in 2003. The initial collection consisted of four manuscripts represented by 230 folios in photographic and microfilm form, all subsequently digitised in 2005. In 2005-2007, in the course of fieldwork conducted by Dmitry Bondarev and Abba Isa Tijani in northern Nigeria, and in 2009-2013 by Dmitry Bondarev in Nigeria, Niger and the Republic of Chad, the corpus of digitised manuscripts was substantially increased to more than 5,000 folios, including five more copies of the Qur’an and numerous other bilingual (Arabic and Old Kanembu) manuscripts. The collection now spans a period of about 400 years, from the oldest manuscripts found by Bivar (17th to early 18th centuries) to the manuscripts of a later period (18th to late 20th centuries), produced in different places in northern Nigeria, southeast Niger and west Chad."

“OMAR was built at the University of Freiburg (Germany), in cooperation with the Center of Informatics of the Unversity of Tübingen (Germany). The databank contains images of approx. 2.500 Arabic manuscripts (in full text, 134.000 images) from Mauritania together with the corresponding bibliographical metadata.

Europe

To browse catalogue entries for Arabic, Turkish and Persian manuscript holdings at the Austrian National Library (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek), navigate to the “Erweiterte Suche” page in the ÖNB-HANNA-Katalog and choose “Arabisch,” “Türkisch” or “Persisch” from the “Sprache” drop-down menu.

“The collection of Arabic manuscripts in the National Library of the Czech Republic contains 200 items. It is a component part of larger holdings of Oriental manuscripts, especially Persian, Turkish, and Indian. The whole collection of Orientalia has ca. 1200 volumes of which Indian manuscripts mainly on palm-leaves form more than a half.

The library possessed a small number of Oriental manuscripts in the 19th century as it results from the documents from the period, when the director of the library was Pavel Josef Safarik. Large acquisitions of Oriental manuscripts took place in 1920s and 1930s. From this time also their first - rather imperfect - list has been preserved. Their more detailed processing is taking place only towards the end of 1990s.

The Arabic manuscripts cover various branches of human activity as, for example, logic, mathematics, religion, politics, law, astronomy, medicine, science of nature, or literature. Concrete information about their acquisition has not been preserved.

This short catalogue is their first list ever published.”

France

Calames: Online catalogue of archives and manuscripts in French University and Research libraries (Union catalogue, France)

Growing selection (currently 650 indexed, 500 digitized) from the 3,500 manuscripts held at the Gotha research library.

"The research library Gotha harbors one of the largest Oriental manuscript collections in Germany comprising about 3,500 codices, primarily in Arabic, Turkish and Persian. The collection covers more than 800 years of Islamicate scholarship and features manuscripts from all disciplines, amongst them history, theology, jurisprudence, medicine, science, grammar, lexicography and literature."

“The project aims at the historical and codicological research on, database development and digital presentation of the private Arabic-Islamic library of the Damascene Rifā'ī family. This library, called "Refaiya" (Rifā'īya) - comprising 488 carefully preserved volumes and handed down over several centuries until the 19th century - is the precious core of the approximately 3,200 Oriental manuscripts kept at Leipzig University Library. It is probably a unique example of a cohesive, traditional Arabic-Islamic family library. The preservation of its historical formation is due to the direct acquisition by the Prussian Consul and Arabist Johann Gottfried Wetzstein from its last owner, 'Umar Efendi al-Rifā'ī al-Ḥamawī, in 1853....

The trilingual database (English, German and Arabic) and the digitization will facilitate the presentation of a cohesive pre-modern Damascene family library on the Internet and, thereby, make the manuscripts accessible internationally - including the Islamic world - for further research. The digital recording of the Refaiya manuscripts is based on the DFG-funded database, "Pilot Project for a database-supported indexing and digital presentation of the recently acquired Arab, Turkish and Persian manuscripts at the University of Leipzig" ( www.islamic-manuscripts.net ).”

“This project is sponsored by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) for the purpose of establishing a database-supported index of and digital access to Arabic, Persian and Turkish manuscripts recently acquired by the Leipzig University Library. This project is part of the DFG's "Cultural Heritage" programme in the field of Scientific Library Services and Information Systems (LIS)".The project will set up a database-supported index and provide digital access to a group of about 55 Arabic, Persian and Turkish manuscripts.

The Leipzig University Library purchased these manuscripts in 1995 and 1996. In this pioneer project, for the first time Arabic script will be integrated into a database that will also feature German and American transliteration systems. This will provide scholars of Oriental Studies worldwide with access to a hitherto unknown pool of Islamic manuscripts.The variety of disciplines covered in the manuscript collection, the origins of some works from early periods of Islamic scholarship, the age of the copies and their historical proximity to the respective author, as well as the elaborate decoration, deserve special attention. A key place in the collection will be taken by one of the oldest known Ismaili manuscripts in the world, the Kitāb al-Zīna by the Ismaili author Abū Hātim al-Rāzī (d. 322 H. / 934 AD).The manuscripts contain texts in Arabic, Persian and Ottoman-Turkish and show an amazingly broad spectrum as far as the content is concerned, which comprises almost all traditional Islamic fields of knowledge. With a few exceptions, the manuscripts are mostly complete and well preserved. That many of these manuscripts came from the libraries of private scholars or families is suggested in several manuscripts by the many comments, some of which span over several generations, from the previous owners. The place of origin seems to be the gulf region, Yemen and Iran.”

Links to digitized catalogues for selected Oriental manuscripts (Arabic, Armenian, Greek, Indian) in the holdings of the Tübingen University Library, including Weisweiler's catalogue for Arabic manuscripts:

Online Catalogue of Arabic Manuscripts in the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences

“With the help of TIMA, a project was started in November 2008 to catalogue sixty Arabic manuscripts in the Oriental Collection of the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (LHAS) within the on-line catalogue of the library. Upon the successful realisation of this project, TIMA helped with a further grant in 2009 the completion of cataloguing. In this new phase the description of 112 MSS was envisaged.

Although the Library was established in 1826, and although its Oriental Collection has been the single most important source for Oriental studies in Hungary, its manuscript collections remained without cataloguing until recently. A few years ago the catalogue of Turkish manuscripts was printed, but the Arabic and Persian manuscripts remained without a proper catalogue. This project intended to remedy this situation thereby bringing the collection to the attention of the interested public.”

See the database within the catalogue which also includes MSS in languages other than Arabic (from the English version of the catalogue select "Databases" then "Manuscripts of the Oriental Collection")

“In 1982 the Swedish diplomat and philologist Gunnar Jarring (1907-2002) donated his unique collection of manuscripts from Eastern Turkistan to the University Library in Lund. It is an extremely rich collection, possibly the biggest in the world. The manuscripts come from the periphery of the Islamic world in Central Asia, that in the Eastern, or Chinese, Turkistan from cities like Kashgar, Yarkend and Urumchi.

This service provides access to Gunnar Jarring's own preliminary hand-written catalogue, a searchable index of brief manuscript descriptions and in some cases scanned images.”

“The Jarring Collection consists of 560 manuscripts from Eastern Turkestan, today's Chinese province of Xinjiang. The books date from the 16th to the 20th centuries. The collection not only mirrors Eastern Turkestan society and culture with its classic and folk literature, Islamic religious manuscripts, judicial and historic documents, manuals of medicine, trades and mysticism etc., but also contains documents from the Mission Covenant Church of Sweden in Eastern Turkestan. The manuscripts were donated to the library by the Swedish diplomat and philologist Dr. Gunnar Jarring (1907-2002), who also supplied a summary catalogue of the collection in English. His handwritten catalogue has now been digitised as well as some of the unique manuscripts.”

"The project Annotated Turki Manuscripts from the Jarring Collection Online is an effort to provide better access for the public to materials in the Central Asian manuscripts collected by a number of Swedish scholars and donated by Prof. (and Ambassador) Gunnar Jarring to the Lund University Library in Sweden. The project is directed by Prof. Arienne M. Dwyer and Dr. C. M. Sperberg-McQueen.

We focus on non-translated manuscripts written in the the late Chaghatay language of the southern Tarim Basin, in what is today Xinjiang. In partnership with Lund University Library, our aim is to scan many more manuscripts than are currently available; to transcribe a large portion of these, and to provide additional linguistic annotation and translations for select manuscripts. The project also aims to create a digital edition of one manuscript.

The project began in early 2015; in the course of the project period (2015-2018) we scanned selected manuscripts, then made and will continue to make transcriptions of selected scans, and linguistic annotation of select transcriptions available on this site."

Manuscripts portal of the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Searchable electronic catalogue with images for some manuscripts available to those who register. Includes entries for manuscripts from collections in numerous Turkish libraries (https://www.yazmalar.gov.tr/kutuphane.php) and libraries outside Turkey as well.

“This catalogue provides a searchable interface to basic manuscript descriptions from some of the major manuscript collections in the UK. With the continuing contribution of manuscript records from UK libraries, Fihrist aims to become a union catalogue for manuscripts in Arabic script. More info.”

As of June 2013, includes entries for manuscripts from collections of the following UK libraries:

"Cataloging is now available online for the entire collection of the nearly 2200 manuscripts comprising the New Series of Islamic Manuscripts in the Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. The New Series constitutes the premier collection of predominantly Shi`ite manuscripts in the Western Hemisphere and among the finest in the world."

Arabic Manuscripts from West Africa: A Catalog of the Herskovitz Library Collection (Northwestern University, Evanston, IL)

“The Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University houses an important collection of Arabic script materials from West Africa. It contains over 5,000 items collected from Africa and donated to the library by several Northwestern professors. Original, hand-written manuscripts make up more than 60 percent of the content, which also includes ‘market’ editions (photocopies of handwritten works that are often sold in African marketplaces), printed editions, and photocopies. Most are in Arabic, though some are in ajami—African languages such as Hausa, Fulfulde, and Wolof written in the Arabic script.”

“The Minasian Collection of Persian and Arabic manuscripts consists of works related to the studies of theologians and scholars in centers of learning in Iran from the 16th through the 19th centuries. The manuscripts, which include both bound collections and single works, chiefly date from the 14th to the 17th centuries, and shed light on the social, religious, and political history of Iran and Shī'īsm.

These records of works within the Minasian Collection, which is not yet fully cataloged, represent a collaboration between the UCLA Research Library (Department of Special Collections) and the Digital Library Program to provide online access to UCLA's extensive Near Eastern collections, which include many uncataloged works in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and Armenian.”

Islamic Medical Manuscripts at the National Library of Medicine (Bethesda, MD)

“Welcome to Islamic Medical Manuscripts at the National Library of Medicine. Here you can learn about Islamic medicine and science during the Middle Ages and the important role it played in the history of Europe. This site, with its biographies, colorful images, and extensive historical accounts of medieval medicine and science is designed for students and everyone interested in the history of Islamic and European culture.

For students, the site includes an extensive glossary of medical, scientific, and book-production terminology linked to the text.

For advanced scholars, the site provides a catalogue raisonné (including images) from the 300 or so Persian and Arabic manuscripts in the National Library of Medicine. Most of these manuscripts deal with medieval medicine and science and were written for learned physicians and scientists. Some of the manuscripts are richly illuminated and illustrated.”